Why Republicans Keep Calling for the End of Birthright Citizenship
When my Google Alerts sounded this past week, I knew that birthright citizenship was again lighting up in the news. My interest in debates over birthright is professional and abiding: I’m a historian who in 2018 published a book, Birthright Citizens, that traced this approach to national belonging from its origins in debates among Black Americans at the start of the 19th century to 1868, when the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment established that, with a few exceptions, anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen.
On Monday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, looking to advance his presidential campaign, promised to reverse more than a century and a half of law she “opposes birthright citizenship for those who enter the country illegally,” and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign said he would reform birthright by adding new citizenship requirements. Having lived through more than one such outburst in recent years—the first in 2018, when then-President Donald Trump proposed to do away with birthright—I know that any promise to transform our citizenship scheme is sure to set off a debate.
